Alive, Alone

By: Alexander Rivera

My room was on the far end of the narrow passageway, and I had lived there for a long time. The room was provided for me as a form of gratitude for cleaning the place from rat and pigeon droppings, clutter and cigarette butts. When inside the corridor the only light that was available to me came through the back of the translucent billboards, and the traces of discrete daylight passing through the cracks under the passageway.

I did my job at night; I put on my work clothes, polished my black boots until they gave a faint shine and went on to work. I stopped to admire my boots when I passed an area where the light was more distinct; they were in good condition even for their age. I liked the smell of the leather and spit mixed together for shine, it reminded me vaguely of sitting as a kid in my dear mother’s dungeon when she wasn’t around, with all the whips and various torturing instruments fabricated from leather which were soiled with the blood and sweat of her paying customers.

I uttered in surprise when an ominous looking rat hurried its way over my left boot and into the crevasses of the space. I walked on through the narrow corridor with a sigh and yearned for the fresh air that awaited me outside. I opened the small hatch slowly and exited my oblong vault. The downpour of seven o’clock had brought with it the smell of the city, I could smell it clearly, it formed pictures in my head of pedestrians moving by the night traffic with haste, clinging to their big black umbrellas, running to bus stops and subway station to reach their desired destinations.

I had no terminus, I was stuck here and there was nowhere for me to go, nobody to wait for me. I could imagine their initial anticipation of reaching their houses after work, but soon realizing that it’s already a destination so familiar to them it is not simply a question of striving to get there to break free from the daily routine of their working space but equally of looking forward to the activity of traveling per se. I imagined that many people found themselves taking this activity as an act of endurance, they are so used to getting from point to point, in doing so they end up ignoring the simple pleasures revealed by taking time and enjoying their precious traveling bubble, a privilege I haven’t had in a long time. I exited neither in the present nor had I any hopes of establishing a better life for myself in the future; I had no destination and no motivation.

Without a further thought I crouched and took out my cloth, put my bucket of sallow unctuous water next to me and started wiping the grime stained billboards. It was quiet; nobody was passing by the transitional bridge between the Tigerton Inc building and the down pass that night. I only saw people on rare occasions and it was for the best that way, people nowadays seemed to be obsessed with the global polemic about raising oil costs and they were easily aggravated by the slightest divergence from their route and always showed reluctance to communicate.

I went from billboard to billboard and cleaned as much of the dirt and bird scatterings as I could without an effective solvent in my possession. By the end of it I was exerted from the labor and trudged with drooping steps back to the hatch. I picked up a cigarette butt that had not been smoked till its end and put it in my pocket. I walked clumsily between the columns inside the hatch as my eyes were not used to the darkness of the passageway.

My room was lit by one singly oil lamp which I took with me to my chair and put down on the floor next to me, I took out the cigarette, lit it and inhaled the tobacco. The cigarette was potent and intoxicating: one of those foreign brands they had in the Far East. That night I slept a troubled and spiteful sleep, dreaming that I was a man-eating beast analogous to lycanthropy, hunting for flesh and creating carnage in my path.

A loud noise woke me up in the night; I could hear the raindrops tempestuously hitting the pavement outside. I rushed out of my room to see what had caused my uprising, I walked carefully through the corridor with bare feet, trying not step on any sharp objects. I told myself that it must be another homeless person sheltering himself from the rain as I walked down the cold path; it angered me as I felt it was my precedence to be here. There was nobody there and I had covered the whole circumference of the place. I decided to walk outside to see if there wasn’t someone outside trying to make their way in.

The rain was assailing down on my naked body when I registered her presence, she turned around and looked at me.